The G.O.P. and a Woman’s Level

Congresswoman Renee Ellmers, a North Carolina Republican, appears to consider herself a latter-day Abigail Adams, urging the men in her party to remember the ladies—and to remember that they may have trouble with the sort of things one learns in math class. This includes charts and big numbers. “We need our male colleagues to understand that if you can bring it down to a woman’s level and what everything that she is balancing in her life—that’s the way to go,” Ellmers said. She was speaking at a panel put together by the Republican Study Committee, a group of conservative congressmen; it was meant to address what the Republicans seem to regard as the mystery of women. Ashe Schow, a reporter for the Washington Examiner, recorded the remarks, which was useful, since Ellmers said, after Schow’s first story, that they were “taken completely out of context.” Here is more of that context:

Men do tend to talk about things on a much higher level. You know, one of the things that has always been one of my frustrations and I speak about this all the time—many of my male colleagues, when they go to the House floor, you know, they’ve got some pie chart or graph behind them and they’re talking about trillions of dollars and, you know, how the debt is awful and, you know, we all agree with that.

Which is sadder and more tired: the idea that men speak on “a much higher level” than women, or that a guy on the floor of Congress pointing at a four-color graph is some sort of daunting sophisticate? Pie charts are not objects of transcendence. If one gets impatient when Paul Ryan, say, goes on a bit too long with one of those graphs showing that we are doomed unless we smash Medicaid into little ineffectual pieces, it’s likely not because of his too blindingly quick mind but rather his dodgy math and his pleased callousness.

Ellmers’s comments reflect a certain Republican school of thought: women love the G.O.P; they just don’t realize it. (Their lack of self-awareness is such that, as a G.O.P. postmortem on the 2012 election noted, Obama’s margin with women was eleven per cent.) This, Ellmers said, is a matter of “tone”: “Women, by and large, agree with us on all of the issues. If you go through each issue, they agree. It’s how we are able to articulate ourselves—make sure that we’re getting the point across that we care, before we do anything else.” In other words, there is no cause to reëxamine how one is treating a woman; maybe, just maybe, how loudly one tells her what to do. Ellmers and others on the Republican Women’s Policy Committee were “really working with our male colleagues”—and, she granted, they did need work.

Republican men should talk about how they had wives, sisters, and daughters, Ellmers said; they should tell women that Obamacare “is hurting your family”; and they should realize that “the biggest need that women have is more time—time for families, careers, and “more time in the morning to get ready.” She did not mention time for drawing one’s own pie charts. And, in what might have been a moment of self-awareness, she added, “We have a tendency to turn people off right away, depending on what’s being said.”

But women are not misunderstanding the G.O.P.; they are understanding it too well, and there will be more train wrecks in the midterms if its members don’t realize that. Certain Republicans, for example, have gotten into trouble when talking about rape, which some in the Party have suggested could be solved by speaking more sensitively, or avoiding the topic. The problem is that rape has become tied to a subject Republicans can’t stop talking about: abortion. Todd Akin, who lost the Missouri Senate race in part because of his ramblings about “legitimate rape,” was trying to make a point about not allowing rapes he didn’t regard as real be a reason to end a pregnancy. Ellmers said that Republicans should just tell women straight out how they felt on social issues: they might not agree, “but they appreciate and they respect the fact that you have shared that with them and that they understand now where you stand on the issue.” Is the idea they will be so flattered that they won’t mind, say, not having a clinic within five hundred miles?

After Schow’s piece appeared Sunday night, Ellmers responded to the immediate criticism by calling it, among other things, sexist: “If there is a problem, who is perpetuating it? Was it a room full of women laughing, bonding and sharing solutions—or a liberal woman reporter attacking the event and taking it to a dark place that does not exist?” Here is another Republican trope: that talking about enduring issues of gender or racial equity in anything but cheerful, grateful tones is itself sexist or racist. (Jelani Cobb has more on this.) It was divisive; it wasn’t nice.

It could be that there is a more charitable explanation for Ellmers’s remarks. She may be giving us a glimpse not of how she feels about men and women and their capacities but of what she has learned about the only practical way for a woman to manage the men in the G.O.P. caucus, or in a lot of other places. Just keep telling them that the problem is that they are much too clever, on a much higher plane, and they might stop acting foolishly. Their own elevated status is a subject about which they might actually be curious; they might stop and listen for five minutes, and hear more—if, that is, one strikes the right tone.

Photograph by Bill Clark/Roll Call via Getty.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.